Aristotle’s Empiricism: Experience and Mechanics in the 4th Century BC. By Jean De Groot.
Parmenides Publishing, Las Vegas/Zurich/Athens
Pp. xxv, 442, 2014, $107.32

De Groot upsets the modern dismissal of Aristotelian natural philosophy as ‘naively realistic’ or ‘qualitative’ vs. ‘quantitative’, as built up dialectically from conventional opinions rather than making ‘hard contact’ with experience, by showing it to have been more empirical than modern mechanics because based on the kinaesthetic awareness of such things as leaning into a curve as you go around a corner on a motorcycle, so that the tire bites deeper into the road to get traction, an experience that puts us in unmediated contact with an ‘arche’, or principle implying a necessary connection between a subject and an attribute – that is then abstracted into the principle of ratios in the lever and eventually the ‘moving radius principle’ that was (and is) omnipresent in our everyday experience. In other words, ‘arche’ or a principle does not mean something ‘deep’ or reached only after a long train of induction and located at the top of a theoretic or contemplative edifice, but an encounter with power or potentiality (the epistemological origin of ‘dunamis’) and necessity as ‘near the surface’ in the mundane experiences we constantly make use of for action, to get things done efficiently using mechanical advantage. We should therefore imagine Aristotle’s Lyceum as surrounded by workshops and factories, rather than classrooms and libraries, and presupposing a sense of ‘experience’ spanning a sophisticated pre-propositional ‘muscle memory’ - a sense of how to get things done, or to stabilize oneself when one feels oneself in danger of falling, up to the abstraction of invariant traits from diverse sectors of our experience in contemplative mathematics, that constitutes the rich but unseen and presupposed ‘subsoil’ from which Aristotle’s physics grew and which is not outdated even in our own day. This book presents an ‘other’ or alternative Aristotle to the caricature and straw man set up through the mistaken Baconian capitulation to Democratean ‘sense data’, a non-empirical ideology that distorts rather than enhances our radical, unavoidable, pre-philosophic experience of power and necessity. This is a revolutionary book that transforms our view of Aristotle and specifically our evaluation of his natural philosophy.

Heythrop College
Patrick Madigan